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Lotte Lenya: Seeräuber-Jenny/ Seeräuber-Jenny und anderes
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More Magic Lantern Slides
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More Magic Lantern Slides
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More Magic Lantern Slides
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More Magic Lantern Slides
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More Magic Lantern Slides
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More Magic Lantern Slides
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More Magic Lantern Slides : Traur´ich nach dem teuren Kinde/ das ich ritzte in die Rinde
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Pierre Jahan
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Pierre Jahan
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Pierre Jahan
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Amy Archer Gilligan Documentary
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Nurse Gilligan (via Murderpedia)
Amy Gilligan
Nurtured to Death:
Amy Gilligan (1901-1928) was known for her nurturing tonics and nutritional meals at her private nursing home in Windsor, Connecticut. That was until it was discovered that she had added arsenic to her recipe, resulting in the deaths of many of her patients and five husbands, all of whom had named her in their wills right before their untimely deaths.
Sister Amy’s Nursing Home for the Elderly:
In 1901, Amy and James Archer opened Sister Amy’s Nursing Home for the Elderly in Newington, Connecticut. Despite not having any real qualifications for taking care of the elderly, the couple’s nurturing and caring ways impressed their wealthy patrons. The home was such a success that in 1907 the couple opened Archer Home for the Elderly and Infirm, a new and more modern facility in Windsor, Connecticut.
James Archer:
After the move things began to take a turn for the worse. Healthy patients began to die without any recognizable cause other than possible old age. James Archer also died suddenly and the heart-broken Amy lifted her chin, dried her tears and headed to claim the insurance money on a life policy she had purchased on her husband in the weeks before his death.
Michael Gilligan:
After James‘ death, patients at the Archer Home began dying at an almost predictable rate, but the coroner, a close friend of the now deceased James and his wife Amy, determined the deaths were due to natural causes of old age. Amy, in the meantime, met and married Michael Gilligan, a rich widower, who offered to help bankroll the Archer Home.
Precious Amy:
Not long after the two wed, Gilligan also died suddenly from what coroner described as natural causes. Before his death he did manage to have a will drawn, leaving all of his wealth to his precious wife, Amy.
Suspicious Activity:
Relatives of the patients who died at the home began to suspect foul play after each discovered their loving parents, adored brothers, and cherished sisters, had forked over large sums of money to their caretaker Amy Archer, right before their untimely deaths. Authorities were alerted and seeing the pattern of over 40 patients giving money then dying, they raided the home and found bottles of arsenic tucked away in Amy’s pantry.
The Dead Talk:
Amy said she used the poison to kill rodents, but unconvinced, the police exhumed the bodies of several of the patients and discovered large amounts of arsenic in their systems, including that of her last husband, Michael Gilligan.
Natural Causes:
Amy Archer-Gilligan was arrested and found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison where she stayed until she was moved to a state mental institution in 1928, where, totally insane, she died of natural causes.
From Charles Montaldo
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Archer Home
The Archer Private Home for Elderly People Windsor, CT
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Frank Capra: Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)/Bill Ryan: Whatever Went Wrong With Amy? (via Murderpedia)
Whatever Went Wrong With Amy?
By Bill Ryan – The New York Times
March 2, 1997
In a way, Amy Duggan Archer Gilligan might be considered a pioneer in health care in Connecticut. In the early part of this century, Mrs. Gilligan operated a home “for elderly people and chronic invalids,“ in the town of Windsor. She offered some enticements for living there: Most of her clients were elderly men and they could get lifetime care simply by signing over their life insurance policies to her or by giving her $1,000, a healthy amount of money at the time, when they checked in.
In 1916, however, Mrs. Gilligan was arrested. State police, after an investigation, concluded that she had shortened the lives of up to two dozen or so men by poisoning them with arsenic. One of them was Michael W. Gilligan, her second husband. The union had lasted three months when Mr. Gilligan turned up dead.
The arrest of Mrs. Gilligan and her trial in 1917, after many bodies had been exhumed, rocked the state; there were headlines that would do credit to today’s tabloids: “Police Believe Archer Home for Aged a Murder Factory,“ screamed The Hartford Courant’s Page 1 on the morning of May 9, 1916, the day after Mrs. Gilligan was arrested. It set the tone.
Mrs. Gilligan, a prim woman approaching her mid-40’s, was tried for one murder only, at the discretion of the state’s attorney. She was convicted and sentenced to be hanged.
But the verdict was eventually reversed on a technicality and during a second trial she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment. She was incarcerated at the state prison, then a grim old fortress near Wethersfield Cove that normally housed only men. Subsequently Mrs. Gilligan was certified as insane and spent her final years at the state mental hospital in Middletown. In 1962 she died there at the age of 89, having outlived nearly everyone involved in the case. But her story has never died.
For more than eight decades of this century, it has never been totally out of the public consciousness for a couple of reasons. The first is the macabre nature of the case itself, inspiring its retelling in various publications from time to time.
The other is that it was also the inspiration for — of all things — a stage comedy. Many people know of Amy Gilligan, although perhaps not by name.
In the late 1930’s, a New Yorker named Joseph Kesselring, who had read about the Gilligan case as a boy, decided to write a play about it. He journeyed to Connecticut to talk to the people involved and to study court records. The result was “Arsenic and Old Lace,“ the Amy Gilligan story with a lot of poetic license by Mr. Kesselring.
He transformed Amy into a pair of Brooklyn spinsters, Abby and Martha Brewster, who took to murdering elderly gentlemen by giving them elderberry wine spiced with arsenic and then burying them in the cellar. The cast of characters included an equally dotty brother, Teddy, who thought he was Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill, forever yelling “CHARGE!“ and running up the stairs, and two nephews, the sane Mortimer and the homicidal Jonathan.
The play opened on Broadway early in 1941 and stayed there for three years, allowing people a pleasant few hours‘ escape from the real homicide en masse going on in World War II. The stage run was followed by a Frank Capra movie, starring Cary Grant as Mortimer, that also was a big commercial success.
Both the stage play and movie have lived on healthily since, the play in countless productions varying from high school drama clubs to a successful revival on Broadway in 1986, the movie on video cassette.
One new bit of evidence for the abiding interest in the Amy Gilligan story is a book to be published this spring by Rainbow Press in Torrington.
It is called “Chronicles of Milton: Village Left Behind by Time.“ Milton is a section of the town of Litchfield and the book has been written by a dozen members of the Milton Woman’s Club, some of whom once attended a one-room schoolhouse in the village. Each has written one chapter, in a cooperative effort to detail the history of the village from 1740 and tell about some of the more fascinating people who have lived there.
One of the latter was Amy Duggan.
The Duggan family, says one club member, lived on Saw Mill Road, in a house that still stands. One of Amy Duggan’s sisters was an invalid, because of a jump or fall from a second floor window. There was a brother who would stand in front of a mirror all day, playing the violin.
As Hazel W. Perret, one of the authors. put it, Amy Duggan, and her eventual infamy, is only one small part of the book. “And the rest of it is very good.“ Conversely, she will admit that a bit of sensationalism doesn’t hurt to sell some copies.
Not that the club needs much help. It is paying Pioneer Press to run off 500 copies, 200 of which have been sold in advance, Mrs. Perret said.
In Windsor, 40 miles from Litchfield, interest in Amy Duggan Archer Gilligan continues.
“We get a lot of queries, particularly from students,“ said Laura Kahkonen, director of the Windsor Public Library. Some people ask about the old home for the aged, she said, and then go to check it out.
There it still sits, on a pleasant street called Prospect, just off the center of town, a three-story brick structure with little ornamentation. Today it contains three apartments, its lurid past put behind it.
At the Windsor Historical Society, people drop in to check the file on Amy Gilligan, said Connie Thomas, a staff member. Many visitors also want to watch a video cassette of a television pilot called “Local Legends.“ The story of Amy Gilligan was shot in 1991 by an independent production company as one of the initial offerings for the series, but the series was never sold.
On one recent day, Ruth Bonito, who is active in the historical society of the nearby town of Windsor Locks, was at the Windsor society, checking out the Gilligan file and advancing a theory not often heard about the old case.
She believes that Amy Duggan Archer Gilligan, a woman vilified for most of this century, just might have been innocent.
As far as she can determine, Mrs. Bonito said, all the evidence against Mrs. Gilligan was circumstantial. She did buy arsenic but said it was to control rats at her home. She never confessed to any crimes. The home she ran did have a high death rate, but that didn’t prove the men who lived there were poisoned.
Besides, said Mrs. Bonito, Mrs. Gilligan was a church-going woman who donated a stained-glass window to a Windsor church. Is this the kind of woman who systematically murders people with arsenic?
And then, Mrs. Bonito added, there is even some question about the post-exhumation arsenic found. Mrs. Bonito said she has been informed by Connecticut’s state archeologist, Nicholas Bellantoni, that arsenic was once used extensively by American embalmers. Could that explain the arsenic found in the bodies from Mrs. Gilligan’s home?
“I had heard the story of Amy Gilligan for years and I never doubted it until now,“ said Mrs. Bonito.
Dr. Bellantoni confirms that arsenic was indeed widely used for embalming, from the Civil War to about 1910 and cites a recent publication of the Interior Department that warns that elevated levels of arsenic near old cemeteries is only now beginning to emerge. However, Dr. Bellantoni says he is not sure that those facts can be connected to the Gilligan case.
One thing is sure however. Amy Duggan Archer Gilligan does have a certain fascination.
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Article 5
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David Owens: Amy Archer Gilligan ( via Hartford Courant)
For a fee, Amy Archer-Gilligan promised to care for the elderly tenants of her Windsor home until they died.
Some inmates, as tenants at the time were called, paid a flat sum of $1,000 for life. Some arranged to leave their estates to Archer-Gilligan. Others paid a weekly fee.
For those who made weekly payments, there was an added benefit: Archer-Gilligan might not murder them.
The Archer Home for Elderly and Indigent Persons at 37 Prospect St. operated from the fall of 1907 until May 8, 1916, the day that state police arrived in Windsor to question Archer-Gilligan, search the home and ultimately arrest her for the murder of Franklin R. Andrews, an inmate who had died on May 30, 1914.
„Police Believe Archer Home For Aged A Murder Factory,“ read the lead headline in the next morning’s Courant. „Mrs. Archer-Gilligan Accused Of Murder Of Inmate. Autopsy Shows Two Who Died Were Killed By Poison.“
Archer-Gilligan reacted calmly to her arrest. „I will prove my innocence, if it takes my last mill,“ she told the arresting officers. „I am not guilty and I will hang before they prove it.“
A Suspicious Loan
Andrews‘ sister became suspicious about her brother’s death. As The Courant noted in its Page 1 story on May 9, 1916, „The arrest of the Windsor woman yesterday is the result of the suspicions aroused when Mrs. Nellie E. Pierce of No. 205 Vine St., Hartford, found in the effects of her brother, Franklin R. Andrews, after he died at the Archer House, a letter from Mrs. Archer-Gilligan asking for a loan, ‚as near $1,000 as possible,‘ about which the woman had said nothing to her.“
Pierce questioned Archer-Gilligan about the loan and, at first, she denied receiving one. Later, Archer-Gilligan said it was a gift of $500. After a lawyer hired by Pierce demanded the return of the money, Archer-Gilligan paid it back, „not because she could not keep it but because she did not feel it worth quarreling over,“ The Courant reported.
The questions continued. Andrews, 61, had been in good health and, on the day of his death, had been „seen about the Archer Home as usual,“ The Courant reported. „He spent part of the day working on the lawn at the place.“ He was dead before midnight.
Pierce became suspicious weeks later after finding the letter seeking a loan. She took her concerns about what was going on at the Archer home to Hartford State’s Attorney Hugh M. Alcorn and, after apparently not being satisfied with his response, to Clifton L. Sherman, managing editor of The Courant.
Sherman, intrigued by what Pierce told and other rumors he had heard about the Archer home, assigned Aubrey Maddock, the assistant city editor, to investigate what was happening in Windsor.
Using death certificates, then and now public documents, The Courant investigators determined that 60 people had died at the Archer Home since its opening in 1907. „Forty-eight of them, a number declared to be far in excess of the normal death rate at an institution of this kind, have been reported since January 1, 1911,“ The Courant reported. Only 10 or 12 people lived at the home at a time.
The reporters also determined, again using public documents, that Archer-Gilligan had purchased substantial quantities of arsenic at pharmacies in Windsor and Hartford, which she said was to deal with a rat problem. The Windsor pharmacy was also selling Archer-Gilligan morphine, which she consumed with regularity.
Among the 60 people who had died at the Archer House was James Archer, Archer-Gilligan’s first husband, and Michael Gilligan, who died less than three months after marrying Archer-Gilligan. He left her an estate of about $4,000.
The Courant presented its evidence to the governor, and state police began a quiet investigation into the doings of Archer-Gilligan at her Windsor home.
During that investigation, the remains of two of Archer-Gilligan’s tenants were exhumed, including that of Andrews. Later, three more bodies were exhumed.
‚They Are Old People‘
On the day of her arrest, police asked Archer-Gilligan about the excessive number of deaths in her home. She replied, „Well, we didn’t ask them to come here but we do the best we can for them. They are old people, and some live for a long time while others die after being here a short time.“
And when asked about the financial arrangements she made with her inmates, she said she barely got by. „I am a poor, hard-working woman and I can’t understand why I am persecuted as I have been during the last few years. This is a Christian work and one that is very trying as we have to put up with lots of things on account of the peculiarities of the old people.“
Andrews‘ body had been buried in a Cheshire cemetery for two years when he was dug up on May 2, 1916, a week before Archer-Gilligan’s arrest for his murder.
Capt. Robert T. Hurley of the state police testified at Archer-Gilligan’s trial that he and the doctors who examined Andrews‘ body arrived at the cemetery about 9 p.m. The grave had already been opened by cemetery workers.
„The box was taken from the grave,“ The Courant reported on June 26, 1917, during the trial. „It was taken with the body from the grave and carried by the handles to the tool house. The body was well preserved, as was the clothing. The stomach, before the autopsy, appeared to be bloated.“
Dr. Arthur J. Wolff performed the autopsy by the light of two lanterns. He removed several organs, including the stomach. Further analysis revealed the presence of arsenic.
A former tenant, Loren B. Gowdy, 71, testified at Archer-Gilligan’s trial that he and his wife, Alice Graham Gowdy, 69, inquired about moving into the Archer House in May 1914. The couple wanted to move into the room occupied by Andrews and a roommate on June 1, and Archer-Gilligan told them that she could arrange it.
Andrews died on May 30, 1914. On May 31, 1914, Archer-Gilligan sent a telegram to the Gowdys telling them that their room was ready.
The Gowdys moved into the Archer House a few days later and Archer-Gilligan received payment of $1,000, $500 for each. Alice Gowdy died on Dec. 4, 1914, and after her body was exhumed, arsenic was detected in her body.
Loren Gowdy moved out of the Archer House and was alive two years later to testify against Archer-Gilligan at her trial.
Although she was tried only for the murder of Andrews, Archer-Gilligan had been indicted for the poisoning murders of five people: Andrews; Alice Gowdy; Archer-Gilligan’s second husband, Michael Gilligan; Charles A. Smith, who died on April 9, 1914; and Maud Howard Lynch, who died on Feb. 2, 1916. All but Lynch died of arsenic poisoning. Lynch was poisoned by strychnine.
Authorities suspected that Archer-Gilligan actually killed at least 20 of her tenants.
Insanity Defense
The trial began on June 21, 1917, in Hartford. Alcorn was the prosecutor, and Benedict M. Holden defended Archer-Gilligan. The trial drew large crowds and was covered widely in the press.
One of the people who followed the case was playwright Joseph Kesselring, who took inspiration from the Archer-Gilligan case in writing „Arsenic and Old Lace.“
On July 13, the jury began deliberating and took only four hours to find Archer-Gilligan guilty.
Archer-Gilligan was sentenced to die by hanging on Nov. 6, 1917. Meanwhile, her lawyers appealed. Gov. Marcus H. Holcomb granted a reprieve as the appeal progressed.
The Supreme Court of Errors, as it was known, found that the trial judge had erred and ordered a new trial. The second trial began in Middletown on June 12, 1919, and her lawyers mounted an insanity defense.
The trial came to an abrupt end on July 1, 1919, when Archer-Gilligan pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.
Alcorn insisted that Archer-Gilligan was guilty of premeditated murder and expressed confidence that the jury would agree, but agreed to the plea to second-degree murder.
The defense offered psychiatrists and psychologists, who were then known as alienists, to testify to Archer-Gilligan’s mental illness. They also brought up Archer-Gilligan’s use of morphine.
„We believed and still believe, her mentality of such a grade that, aggravated by her use of morphine, as the evidence showed, she was not capable of premeditating the murder of Franklin R. Andrews to the extent that it could be called first-degree murder,“ Holden said.
In accepting the plea, Judge John E. Keeler said, „I am satisfied that, from the evidence they have heard and from my instructions to them, the jurymen would have been satisfied that during the period when she is claimed to have planned and executed the murder of Franklin R. Andrews, there were some doubts as to her sanity, her ability to premeditate and act with the expressed malice the law demands for murder in the first-degree.“
Archer-Gilligan was immediately sentenced to life in prison and began her sentence at the state prison in Wethersfield.
Five years later, on July 17, 1924, Archer-Gilligan was declared insane and transferred to the „state hospital for the insane at Middletown.“
Playwright Kesselring traveled to Hartford to meet with Alcorn, who gave Kesselring access to court records. Kesselring was struck by the extraordinary image of a sweet, church-going lady quietly poisoning people off, The Courant reported in 1974, as the Hartford Stage Company presented „Arsenic and Old Lace.“
Alcorn attended the comedy’s premier on Broadway in 1941 and didn’t care for the show. „He couldn’t understand all the laughter over something he thought was a deadly serious matter,“ one of his sons told The Courant.
Archer-Gilligan spent the remaining 38 years of her life at Connecticut Valley Hospital, where she died on April 23, 1962, at the age of 94.
Hospital officials described her as a quiet and cooperative patient. In its April 24, 1962, report on Archer-Gilligan’s death, The Courant reported: „Mostly she sat in a chair, dressed in a black dress trimmed with lace, a Bible on her lap, and prayed.“
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Amy Archer Gilligan
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Mara Bovsun: True crime story behind classic comedy, `Arsenic & Old Lace´ (via Murderpedia)
By Mara Bovsun – NYDailyNews.com
January 17, 2010
Serial killers, as a rule, are not really great material for a laughfest. Nevertheless, the sordid case of Amy Archer-Gilligan has kept audiences in stitches for decades.
It’s estimated that at least 20 people and some estimate as many as 100, including her husbands, died by her hand. Yet, 20 years after her crimes were revealed, a playwright, Joseph Kesselring, would find it all terribly funny and pen a comedy destined to become a classic – „Arsenic and Old Lace“.
In the play, the Connecticut Borgia is transformed into two sisters – Abby and Martha Brewster, one a „darling lady in her sixties“ and the other, „a sweet elderly woman with Victorian charm.“ The victims were aged men who lived in their boarding house. The quaint weapon of choice: Elderberry wine, spiked with arsenic.
The real-life character was a stern eccentric who ran a convalescent home in Windsor, Connecticut, at the start of the 20th century.
Little is known about Archer-Gilligan’s early life, other than that she was born in 1873 and was married for the first time in 1896 to James Archer.
In 1901, the couple found employment in Newington, Connecticut, as in-home caretakers for elderly widower John Seymour. The Archers lived in his home during the final years of his life. When Seymour died in 1904, they stayed on there as renters, raising money by caring for elderly boarders.
In 1907, Seymour’s California-based relatives sold the house, so the Archers moved to Winston. They bought a brick house and opened the Archer Home for Aged People. They ran the home together until 1910, when Mr. Archer died of Bright’s disease, a catchall phrase for kidney failure of unknown origin.
By 1913, the widow had snared husband number two, Michael Gilligan, but that didn’t last long either, with his untimely death after just three months of wedded bliss. The cause was an „acute bilious attack,“ in other words, severe indigestion.
On its own, Gilligan’s demise might not have raised too many eyebrows, but the Archer home had turned into a death trap, especially for the men under a special payment plan. Residents could pay on either a weekly basis, or, for one flat fee of $1,000, the good widow guaranteed care for as long as they breathed. Those in this latter category apparently had very poor health, because they kept dropping off.
Within a few year, it was clear it was not a matter of natural causes.
„Police Believe Archer Home for Aged a Murder Factory,“ screamed the Hartford Courant on May 9, 1916.
Since the nursing home opened in 1907, there had been 60 deaths and 48 of them had occurred since 1911. One of the departed, Franklin R. Andrews, 61, had a sister, Nellie Pierce, who found the circumstances of his death suspicious, to say the least.
The morning of May 29, 1914, Andrews was seen cheerfully working on the lawn at the Archer house. By the following evening, he was dead.
Initially Pierce chalked it up to life’s misfortunes, but then she looked through his letters and personal papers and discovered that Archer-Gilligan had been badgering Andrews for money. Pierce shared her suspicions with the district attorney and when she got little response there, she went to the Hartford Courant.
The paper’s investigation lasted several months and provided the basis for a police probe, which lasted a year. Nearly two years after his death, Andrews‘ body was exhumed and an autopsy found arsenic, enough to kill several men. Also, the examiner found no sign that he had „gastric ulcers,“ as was noted on the original death certificate.
Her second husband’s body was exhumed, as well as four other boarders. All had died of poisoning, either arsenic or strychnine.
Also, an examination of Michael Gilligan’s will, drawn up the night before his death and appointing his wife administrator, appeared to be in her handwriting.
More evidence came from local merchants who said that Archer-Gilligan had purchased large quantities of arsenic. „To kill rats,“ she said.
A bad case of „prison psychosis“ made it seem unlikely that she’d come to trial, but on June 18, 1917, the woman suspected of at least a score of murders faced the jury. After a four-week trial and four hours of deliberation, they found her guilty and sentenced her to die on the gallows in November.
The convicted poisoner appealed and, due to a technicality, she was granted a new trial in June 1919. Insanity was her defense the second time around, with alienists declaring her crazy and her 19-year-old daughter, Mary E. Archer, insisting that her mother was a morphine fiend. The trial ended abruptly on July 1, with a plea of guilty of murder in the second degree, which carried a life sentence. She was a model prisoner until 1924, when she was declared hopelessly insane and transferred to a mental hospital. There she stayed, until April 1962, when she died at the age of 89.
Her story, though, lives on in the comedy that opened on Broadway at the Fulton Theater, on January 10, 1941, to rave reviews. „Arsenic and Old Lace,“ which featured Boris Karloff playing a killer who looked like Boris Karloff, made the idea of wholesale slaughter hilarious.
None other than Frank Capra later made it into a film, starring Cary Grant. As one critic crowed, „You wouldn’t believe homicidal mania could be such fun!“
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Amy Archer Gilligan/ Jesse Leavenworth Interviews William Phelps (via Hartford Courant)
Seeking rest and comfort in their final years, Loren and Alice Gowdy of Enfield came to look over the Archer Home for Elderly and Indigent Persons in the spring of 1914. Amy Archer-Gilligan, matron of the Windsor nursing home, showed the Gowdys a room they might like.
The couple, however, noticed a man’s belongings.
„But it looks to be occupied,“ Alice Gowdy said.
„I’ll take care of that, ma’am, don’t you worry,“ Archer-Gilligan responded.
The occupant, Franklin Andrews, died several days later after suffering agonizing stomach pain. Like others before him, Andrews‘ body was removed to a funeral home in the dead of night.
The author of a new book about the case that inspired the play and movie „Arsenic and Old Lace“ says the Gowdys‘ story perfectly illustrates the diabolical scheme that turned an old-folks‘ home into what The Courant labeled at the time „a murder factory.“
M. William Phelps, whose books have included other true-crime tales and a biography of Connecticut’s Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale, said he researched voluminous trial transcripts and other material for years to write what he said is the first comprehensive book about the case.
„The Devil’s Rooming House“ (Globe Pequot Press, $24.95) is due out April 1. Recently, the author and East Hartford native answered questions about the story and its main villain:
Q: What prompted you to write this book?
A: No one seemed to be able to tell the complete story of Amy, and 50 percent of the stuff that’s been written is wrong. Growing up in East Hartford and hearing the story, it was almost like she wasn’t real, the „Witch of Windsor“ and all that. It was almost like a campfire story.
Q: What sparked Archer-Gilligan to kill?
A: I know exactly what it was. It was simple turnover: economics, greed. Her house filled up, and she didn’t expect it to. She has this house full of people who have paid her $1,000 for life care, so she creates the turnover herself.
[On Thanksgiving of 1914, Alice Gowdy fell sick at the nursing home, suffering from a burning in her throat and stomach. She died on Dec. 3, freeing up another bed. An autopsy performed on her exhumed body showed she died of arsenic poisoning. She and Franklin were among five victims named in Archer-Gilligan’s murder indictment in 1916.]
Q: But you also write that Archer-Gilligan [who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 1919] „was a narcissistic sociopath with a discernible grandiosity who enjoyed the process, methodology and comfort that murder provided her soul.“ The picture you paint is of a thoroughly evil woman who actually sent some elderly clients to the drug store to buy the arsenic that would be used to kill them. So money wasn’t her only motive?
A: Greed begins it. … She’s greedy, and she begins to kill, and she has this sociopathic thing in her mind. She was always a mean-spirited person and sort of different. She was always this different person, so when she begins to kill, it’s easy for her.
Q: Her public face was a devout Christian and friend to the elderly, and her secret role was dispatching people in the most excruciating manner. Do you think she enjoyed the disparity?
A: What happens with a serial killer is that killing becomes an addiction, like a drug. … She enjoyed it. It becomes cat and mouse; it becomes a game.
Q: The Courant has reported that during the time people were dying at her nursing home, Archer-Gilligan donated a lot of money to a local church to buy a new altar. Did your research confirm that?
A: I wouldn’t say she donated a lot of money, but she donated enough money to keep her standing in the community. Remember, her standing in the community is everything. She needs to be seen with that Bible in her hand going to church.
Q: Stories about the poisonings often place the number of victims at 20 or 22, but you write that Archer-Gilligan killed „no fewer than 40.“ How did you reach that number?
A: By studying the records, looking at the behavior of Amy while these people were in the house. There’s no way to prove it, but that’s my feeling.
Q: But no one actually witnessed her poison anyone. And you also write that if she was tried today, there’s no guarantee she would be convicted? So can we be sure she was the killer?
A: One hundred percent. No one else had a motive.
Q: You’ve written about other serial killers. Is there something that sets Amy apart?
A: Yes, in some ways, that she had this entrepreneurial spirit, that she had this standing for as long as she had in the community. Most women serial killers, they have a warped life to begin with. That didn’t start for Amy until years later.
Q: The Courant, as you write, played a big role in both the investigation and the reporting of this case. The newspaper worked closely with state police and other authorities before Archer-Gilligan was arrested. That kind of collaboration doesn’t happen anymore, at least not to that degree. Is that regrettable?
A: Absolutely. If you look at it, here you have the editor, Clifton Sherman — he’s hands-on. And the reporter, Carl Goslee, he sees all the obituaries in town; that’s the investigative reporter. Here you have Sherman going to [State’s Attorney] Hugh Alcorn, and they begin to work together. … There’s no reason [journalists and law enforcement personnel] can’t work together.
Q: The house in Windsor still stands, so the last question I’ll ask is: Do you believe in ghosts?
A: If I believed in ghosts, they’d be in that house.
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